I just had a conversation with a big exec from Microsoft, three down from the top, about how one of the major corporations in America is reinventing itself into a cloud-services-based organization. Whether it's Microsoft or Google or Amazon or IBM, every major corporation is rethinking the entire landscape as it relates to computers.

It's a little bit like this: Let's say, in the year 1910, a shoemaker, or a furniture maker, or a clock maker decides he wants to make shoes, or furniture, or clocks. Problem is he needs a consistent source of power. To get it, he builds a power plant along a river or next to a forest to run his steam-fired generators and hires the people to run it.

So now he's in the power business, too. In 2010, 100 years later, the power problem has been taken care of; the whole country's power grid is available through a wall socket.

But now, to run his business, he's got to have a website, e-mail and computers that can receive and send orders and calculate employee payroll.

So, he builds a data center. And, just as in 1910, when he had to have employees who knew how to fix boilers and run steam generators, now he's got to have people who understand virtualized servers, firewalls and virus protection. But all he really wants to do is make his shoes, or furniture, or clocks.

I predict that, in less than five years, these manufacturers are not going to need engineers who understand TCP/IP or possess other technology skills that don't matter to them.

Not to worry. The people are still needed, just like the power people. They have good skills, but just aren't needed by the shoemaker. Now, instead of hiring these software and hardware engineers, he's just going to pay for what he uses via cloud computing.

It's happening right now. He won't need a data center. He's going to find everything he needs when he plugs his computer into that wall jack, the same way we get the power we need when we plug into a socket.

With cloud computing, wherever there is electrical power, there will be computing power.

But with a difference.

Unlike the power grid, cloud computing will be delivered wirelessly — you won't even have to plug into the wall, it'll just be out there, in the air, like 3G cell phone service is today. You won't even be tethered to that wall jack.

And you, like the shoemaker, furniture maker and clock maker, can get back to investing in what YOU want to do.

Paul Hillman is a partner at C/D/H, a 20-year-old technology consulting company based in Grand Rapids.